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An anonymous reader writes: Ben Kuchera at Polygon recommends against buying the upcoming Battlefield Hardline first-person shooter. Not because it's bad — in fact, he doesn't really offer an opinion on how good the game is — but because it's time to stop incentivizing poor behavior from Electronic Arts and its Digital Illusions CE development studio. After EA acquired DICE, Battlefield game launches accelerated, and launch issues with each game were hand-waved away as unpredictable. The studio's principled stand against paid DLC evaporated in order to feed the ever-hungry beast of shareholder value. Kuchera says, "EA continues this because the Battlefield franchise is profitable; we as players have taught them that we'll buy anyway, and continue to support games that don't work at launch." He suggests avoiding pre-orders, and only buying the game if and when it's in a playable (and fun) state. "Every dollar that's spent on Hardline before the game comes out is a vote for things continuing down an anti-consumer path. If the game is a hit before its launch, that sends a message that we're OK with business as usual, and business as usual has become pretty terrible."

I did it. I loved BF3, but I didn't pick up 4 and I won't be picking up Hardline because of EA. In addition to everything the original article mentions, most of which I agree with, one thing not mentioned in the original article is the pay-to-have-everything (which is not "Pay-to-win" only in a very strict sense, but that doesn't make it right).

I don't mind these companies making money, but they do it at the expense of loyal customers, rather than in support of them... I don't think it's a good long-term practice, but that's just me. But it's definitely not nobody.

Roger, same here. I just don't "need" new games bad enough to eat their bullshit, and regardless there are other studios out there who don't practice this screw-the-customer-at-every-turn routine. It's typical corporate greed - yes, they can do everything just short of actually sending a goon to your house to rape you and your dog, and there will still be plenty of people who buy their crap and they'll still make a profit. But I don't have to be one of them.

I also decided not to buy BF4, and have been playing Battlefield as part of a clan since BF2 was popular, every game and every expansion pack. I joked to my friends that I would be back for Battlefield 5 in around 12 months time. When Hardline was revealed, I realised I would probably never return to Battlefield.

Eh, no. Not having access to the multiplayer capabilities of any game is not going to change much about my life - EA might wish it did, but at worst it'd be a minor inconvenience requiring the acquisition of some other entertainment (a 5-second endeavor).

I have bought pretty much every PC release of Battlefield. BF3 was the low point for me, with regular connectivity issues ruining the game, include a long period of EA blaming a DDoS attack. It is painful to be kicked off of server part way through a round because the DRM lost connection to EA servers... There were more in game bugs than an previous release. Origin is an added annoyance. The fact that I had spent $1000 upgrading my gaming PC for BF3 didn't help.

I don't mind these companies making money, but they do it at the expense of loyal customers, rather than in support of them... I don't think it's a good long-term practice, but that's just me.

Funny thing is your average hard drug dealer does the same thing. They make money at the detriment of their loyal customers. They know they'll keep coming back because they are horribly addicted and have nothing else to do. If they eventually do lose a customer, they find a new crowd of young customers that haven't gone through the cycle as many times to get jaded.

I did it. I loved BF3, but I didn't pick up 4 and I won't be picking up Hardline because of EA. In addition to everything the original article mentions, most of which I agree with, one thing not mentioned in the original article is the pay-to-have-everything (which is not "Pay-to-win" only in a very strict sense, but that doesn't make it right).

I don't mind these companies making money, but they do it at the expense of loyal customers, rather than in support of them... I don't think it's a good long-term practice, but that's just me. But it's definitely not nobody.

I've been computer/console gaming since the early 80's and one thing I learned by the 90's. Never pre order any game. NEVER.

Now as for the BF games, I'm on the Hardline Beta and I find the game sort of enjoyable. Now I only own BF3 because it was given away free a month or so ago. Don't plan on buying BF4 either.

But as responsible consumers, people need to stop preordering games. All that does is make it easier for publishers to give you crap, since you already paid them up front. Make the compani

I've been computer/console gaming since the early 80's and one thing I learned by the 90's. Never pre order any game. NEVER.

And, if having the game at the same time as other people isn't required for play (e.g., if multiplayer isn't your primary play style), then just wait until you can get the game at 20% of original cost.

I've spent around $110 on the Steam summer sale, but I picked up 17 games, many of them "AAA", and by now I really know if the game stands the test of time.

But as responsible consumers, people need to stop preordering games. All that does is make it easier for publishers to give you crap, since you already paid them up front. Make the companies earn your money!

Only for so long. Crap on your customers long enough with shoddy products, and eventually they avoid all of your products. See also Microsoft Windows in the mobile realm; where once they had a huge chunk of mobile device OS marketshare (viz. WinCE), they now have a share that is barely larger than statistical noise (2.1% by the most charitable metric I could find on short notice).

I can see EA losing their grip in a couple of years. After all, you can only crap out so many iterations of "Madden", no?

As long as NFL players keep being drafted and retiring, and as long as players want to play as the home team as it exists this year, EA will be able to get away with issuing annually updated versions of Madden NFL. If you want to shut down Madden, you'll have to first shut down college football long enough that the NFL loses its farm system. You could try the CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) angle.

OT, but you didn't look very hard at all, then. The very first links on Google for "Smartphone Market Share" show WP with 3.2-3.3% for Q1 2014, and on a rising trajectory. (https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Market-Rankings/comScore-Reports-March-2014-US-Smartphone-Subscriber-Market-Share). The top (non-Wikipedia) link on Bing for the same search is less precise but says 3%. (http://www.cio.com/article/751867/U.S._Smartphone_Market_Share_Numbers_for_Q1_2014). Those are US numbers; the European numbers are si

Due to the amount of product placement I've seen, I've grown to distrust anyone who cites bing as a source. I'm not saying it's a bad search engine, just that a citation of it in a clearly pro winphone post makes anything you say highly suspect. I would go as far as saying that the shilling is so obvious, I may have been duped into feeding the trolls... again.

OT, but you didn't look very hard at all, then. The very first links on Google for "Smartphone Market Share" show WP with 3.2-3.3% for Q1 2014, and on a rising trajectory. (https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Market-Rankings/comScore-Reports-March-2014-US-Smartphone-Subscriber-Market-Share). The top (non-Wikipedia) link on Bing for the same search is less precise but says 3%. (http://www.cio.com/article/751867/U.S._Smartphone_Market_Share_Numbers_for_Q1_2014). Those are US numbers; the European numbers are significantly higher. It's still the third-place platform, but it *is* third place behind the two giants.

What's in fourth place? As it stands today there are only three horses and the other two are miles away.

Unfortunately that is not the case, The computer gaming demographic may have shifted somewhat in recent years but it's still approximately a window of 5-10 years. In such a small window you can keep making the same mistakes and people that get sick of it are going to be leaving out the top of the age range anyway. There will always be new, young audiences that come in at the bottom.

Best case scenario is you draw a line for yourself and live happy ignoring companies that aren't doing what you want. The ove

I wonder whether kids starting to PC game now even know that once-upon-a-time games worked decently out the box. Whether they ever contemplate the possibility of a game working on the first day...

Is that even something they've ever seen before? I've been to the BF forums and from what I saw the answer is "No". There are plenty of fanboys in there who defend EA/DICE in this regard. Since, you know: "We *all* know games always have problems at release".

Nope, I opted out after my experience with BF3. Still haven't bought BF4 and don't plan to. Definitely won't bother with Hardline.

The problem with all the paid map packs is that it fractures the player base and massively lowers the server populations. Even if you can afford everything, not everyone can. So the game quickly segments because not everyone is running the same maps. If you have the vanilla maps and back to karkand, you can play on vanilla servers and b2k servers. But you can't play on servers running the other map packs. And people who don't own B2K can't play with you when you're on a server that runs B2K maps. So no matter where you go, you don't have as many choices as if everyone was part of the same map-owning population.

One other bad idea was introducing such an intense equipment/weapon grind in BF3, because even though it got me to play BF3 a lot more, it also soured me on the entire idea of playing the game going forward. Most of my memories of BF3 are of grinding out weapons on high ticket Metro Meatgrinder servers. In my memory, most of the game was dominated by grinding instead of playing. There was grinding in BF2, but it was a grand total of half a dozen weapons and everyone had them all pretty quickly. There weren't 20 different attachments for each weapon and 30 different subtly different assault rifles, etc. Maybe it made the gameplay less varied, but in BF2 people mostly just focused on playing the game instead of grinding unlocks. The medal grinding in BF2 didn't seem as big an annoyance.

Linux might not be the best analogy because it had a clear set of requirements to follow, namely POSIX. Video games are far more underspecified unless they are simulations of an existing board game or outdoor sport. The theory of what makes an operating system efficient is far more fleshed out than what makes a game fun. This means there's no objective measure of something being "better" to settle disputes among contributors' competing visions.

I think it's been a long standing policy to push forward on optimisation and game refinement at the expence of stability. Which does work for a lot of teams and seems to be standard practice in Sweedish studios, which can be inferred by looking at games like Magica, Goat Simulator or even to a lesser extent Minecraft. You cannot blame EA for this.

It's a fair bit different when you pay $15 for a game that is announced as still being in alpha (or $20/beta, or to a lesser extent, even $25/release) when it comes to tolerating bugs. Paying $60 for a game, and then being forced to buy content on top of it, certainly makes any remaining problems a lot less acceptable. Also, Minecraft has always had an emphasis on privately owned servers that cost nothing to set up, meaning that I'm not the least bit concerned they might "turn off the lights" some day.

The idea of opportunity cost is valid, however saying that all pirates would have bought the game is wrong, and that's how they inflate their numbers.

If we somehow managed to make piracy impossible, would be pirates could simply not play the game.- because they don't have the budget- because it's not easily available- because of restrictions (invasive DRM, internet connection,...)- because the competition is cheaper (Photoshop piracy probably hurt Paint Shop Pro more than Photoshop itself)

Both those activities will end up with you losing $160. How would you "Lose nothing" by gaming.

Furthermore, gaining a skill (Which I assume you undergoing some kind of training) is an investment in yourself. That skill could potentially be recognized as an advantage over other job applicants or a basis for a promotion. So overall that is a wise expenditure of $160.

Gaming on the other hand is completely worthless market-wise. You spent $160 on enjoyment and relaxation that you get from a game. Whi

EA's game costs $50. There are 1000 teenagers willing to pay to play it.

This is the problem with all piracy claims. There is no way to verify that those 1000 teenagers would actually pay the money for the game if that really was the only way to play the game. They might say they would pay, but when push comes to shove, that $50 might be too much for them to afford, so they just do without.

Based on all the survey results I have seen, many people who use software that isn't properly licensed do so because the license terms are too painful, not because the actual cash outlay is

Gamers have always been willing to accept virtually non existent levels of software quality and never seem willing to hold the developers feet to the fire over the issues. If you look at most MMOs they seem to use design flaws as content these days balance problems and re-balancing combat/roles seem to be top design failures with very little legitimate cause.

I'm in the beta and I can see people enjoying it that enjoy games like cs:go, payday, etc...
I don't see why people hate, just don't buy it if you don't want to play it.
I agree not to pre-order most games since they drop in price usually a couple weeks later.
I enjoy the frostbyte engine over most fps, engines. I'm sure it will have its click of players if they support it right.

The only GOOD Battlefield was BF 1942 and its expansions. When BF:Vietnam came out and allowed picking any primary class with any secondary class, it just ruined the game, killed cooperation and turned it into a free-for-all.

Yeah, Desert Combat was cool as hell, but I thought the inherent small size limits of the maps made modern jets quite a bit over powered in terms of their ability to move across the map quickly. Most DC maps I played were quickly dominated by the jets.
Hell, there are still BF1942 servers up, I may have to dig out my disks this weekend:)

So long as big, publicly-owned companies are churning out games they are generally only going to consider profit and perception by shareholders as the end goal.

Companies who create a good game for the sake of the game itself can often see profits as a result of their dedication -- the end goal is always putting out a game which is as good as that studio can feasibly put out. $$$ is welcome, but secondary. For this reason, I am an advocate for game developers to stay privately owned. If I hear about a

the bean counters will never understand how software is developed and I am not talking about inhibiting profitability but how to increase profitability. Instead they compare software development with factories and wants square blocks of 'workload' outlining a project and when that is not working they just add more blocks or extend overtime reducing profitability even more. They hate hearing that software development is an art or like a green house where some pots needs more water than other and some needs f

The only way that the studios will ever get the message is if parents refuse to buy this garbage for their children. Older gamers are a minority of the market. There are plenty of gamers in the 18-30 age bracket who will continue to buy this garbage. The only way out is for parents who game, to make wise choices for their children.

It will take a generation to change things, but it can happen.

I finally learned my lesson, but I am guilty of pre-ordering way too many crap releases from EA. BF4 was the last

For one thing, that depends on how you define "older". The average age of a gamer is early thirties [theesa.com]. For another, a lot of these first-person shooters are rated M by ESRB because they're so violent. This means responsible stores won't sell them to minors and warn parents about buying them for minors.

I think the best that we, as a community, can hope for is that enough people exercise impulse control and wait to buy the game until the price is reduced once or twice.

That doesn't help if the only reason for a discount is that the sequel with an updated roster is out. How many people are willing to buy a sports game whose rosters are outdated and whose multiplayer matchmaking

That is a really interesting PDF. I never would have guessed that the average gamer is 31 years old.

I was thinking about the multi-player server stranglehold while I was typing my post, so it is interesting that you brought it up. I do not know if anything can be done about it. I cannot conceive of any legal way to obligate companies to keep infrastructure online, and as much as it might benefit me, I would be opposed to governmental intervention in the matter.

RealityMod on stock BF2 is the only FPS We will ever need.
It still to this day gets updates (v1.2 just got released May-2014), the community based effort has fostered a higher production value than any of the commercial crap getting pumped out (they produce all their own high quality textures, record all their own sounds for every weapon, and had access to military equipment for recording the "big booms"), the gameplay is incredibly immersive, and team based tactics/strategy is the only way to win.

I've never been a great FPS player, but I do enjoy the genre, or at least I used to. (Apparently, kids these days think camping at spawn points is cool. In my day, that would get you kicked.) I really liked BF2. I liked hopping in anti aircraft batteries and gibbetting whole groups of people until inevitably someone stuck a bomb on the back on detonated it. Loads of fun. When I got BF3, I thought, "What the fuck is this?" Every gun, every add-on had to be unlocked. It was stupid, and made an already frustr

Nothing new. EA is still being EA. People are still calling for boycotts of EA. People are still getting excited about the trailers and preordering anyway. You have to get the special pre-order items, right?

I haven't bought an EA game in a very long time because their bad behavior has been going on for over a decade. If you think gamers are going to boycott them rather than getting sucked up in all the hype you haven't been paying attention. Don't let that stop you from trying though.

I already stopped buying BF3 and BF4, this is why:- I dont want DLC forced on me. I want to buy it once for 40 bucks and play it forever.- I dont want to earn better weapons. I want to play it at once, not being able to blame losing on that opponents superior riffle.- I dont want to have to buy a new computer. I want to play it for 40 bucks.- I dont want to pay 60 bucks. I want to play it for 40 bucks.

I stopped caring about the Battlefield franchise after 2142, not because of the bundled content, but because of the rich community of modders around it.

I spent countless hours playing fun things like Pirates, or the "starwars" clones Galactic Conquest [moddb.com] & First Strike [fsmod.com], and even some mods that later spawned official content such as Eve of Destruction [eodmod.org] (Vietnam) and Desert Combat [moddb.com] (2). When you got bored of mindlessly shooting others, you could race with cars in fantastic impossible "stunt" like racetracks wi

In common usage, "incentivize" is somewhat neutral, wheras "incite" has connotations of hatred and/or violence. Just googling around a bit, I even pulled up an example of somebody using the distinction in a title [linkedin.com].

Adults don't stop playing games. As a matter of fact, humans never stop playing games throughout their entire lives. Haven't you seen old men playing chess or backgammon? Football, soccer, even courting are all games. Even haggling is a game in a certain sense.

I'm confused about whether that is a serious post or a troll. It has to be a troll. 3 apostrophes used, all incorrectly. 3 uses of your/you're, all incorrect. And the assertion that a console built on PC hardware is more powerful than "the current PC". There's no way that can be a serious post.

The Xbox 360 isn't built on PC hardware, actually - PowerPC instruction set, a slightly weird 3-core hyperthreaded CPU. Admittedly it has a good clock speed, even today (3.2GHz IIRC) but that's no PC part and you can easily get laptops more powerful than that now (my desktop, which was admittedly built for gaming, blows it away - 8 cores at 4GHz, plus 32GB of RAM vs. 0.5GB). The graphics chip isn't PC-standard either, although it's made by a company that makes PC GPUs too...

The Xbox 360 isn't built on PC hardware, actually - PowerPC instruction set

Then it was built on something closer to Mac hardware. The PowerPC Macintosh computers were personal computers, even though they weren't IBM-compatible PCs. And both Mac and 360 were using ATI (now AMD) graphics. Since then, both Mac and Xbox have moved from PowerPC to x86-64 (Mac to Intel and Xbox to AMD), and IBM-compatible PCs are now Lenovo-compatible.

And the assertion that a console built on PC hardware is more powerful than "the current PC"

I can see a specific context in which such an assertion can be valid, by comparing a console and PC with the same retail price. The price of a gaming PC has to include a Windows license, unlike a console that ships with a homemade operating system. It also has to include more markup because a PC maker can't really sell at cost and extract a continuing revenue stream from a monopoly on application distribution the way a console maker can.

You can disprove this by telling us where to buy a living-room gaming PC for $399.

That's disingenuous. Microsoft makes money on the actual games, which allows them to discount the cost of the hardware. They sell the hardware at a loss and recoup the money with games and peripheral licensing. I'll be happy to spec out a computer with the same capabilities that you can build yourself though, since this discussion is about power and not price. And then I'll spec out one with twice the power. Then three times. I've got one in my living room right now, and it can do a lot more than the

a PC maker can't really sell at cost and extract a continuing revenue stream from a monopoly on application distribution the way a console maker can.

[A console maker] makes money on the actual games, which allows them to discount the cost of the hardware. They sell the hardware at a loss and recoup the money with games and peripheral licensing.

Exactly my point. Its cryptographic monopoly on software distribution lets a console maker make money on the games.

I'll be happy to spec out a computer with the same capabilities that you can build yourself though

Consoles offer the convenience of not having to spend hours learning to build a PC.

In fact, it can do everything that a PC can.

Including get a virus. I've watched an inexperienced user surf the Internet on a PC running Windows 7, and she was fooled by the "your PC is running slow" ads before I stopped her. "Where did Google go?" she asked when her homepage was switched to Conduit. I've seen other inexperienced users get taken in by fake

I understand what you're saying, but none of that relates to what I originally said:

And the assertion that a console built on PC hardware is more powerful than "the current PC". There's no way that can be a serious post.

I'm talking about computing power. Not price, not convenience, not flexibility, etc. OP said that XBox 360 is more powerful than a current PC, which was what I was addressing. That's the only thing I was addressing.

I agree with your point that the most powerful PC is more powerful than Xbox One and far more powerful than Xbox 360. But the most powerful PC is irrelevant in the consumer market, whose behavior helps determine whether major third-party developers make games for PC or not. The most powerful PC isn't worth much for gaming if most of the games you want to play are exclusive to consoles because not enough potential buyers have the most powerful PC to make a PC port viable.

By then I'll have the most up-to-date version hopefully with all the kinks worked out, plus DLC that will be included ("Gold Package", "Collectors Edition" etc) or cheap to download. I've been buying games like this for years now.

Without the release day buyers, there's not going to be a collectors edition at 50% off a year later.

So you should thank the early adopters / launch day lemmings, because your buying habits are only sustainable on their backs.

I can see it for Madden NFL, where EA holds exclusive rights to all football leagues. But what exclusive rights keep the open source community from creating its own FPS incorporating the play style of older Battlefield?